


Homo, Fuge (O Fly On)

by saberator



Category: Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe, Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Homo Fuge, Original Work
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Friendship Through Time, Hal Faust uses he/him pronouns but he is nonbinary, LGBT Rewrite, M/M, Mephistopheles is genderqueer, Nonbinary Character, Other, Period-Typical Misgendering, Period-Typical Sexism, modern adaptation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23906905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saberator/pseuds/saberator
Summary: “Had I many souls as there were stars, I would give them all to you.”“Oh, shut up.”
Relationships: Death / Gretchen (O Fly On), Henry Faust / Mephistopheles (O Fly On), Lucifer / Lilith (O Fly On)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. Prologue

“Do you see this man?” an elderly gentleman, all salt and pepper hair and crinkled kind eyes, spoke in a tone that was only His ; all-loving, but one could never seem to understand the intentions behind. The kind of tone one would speak to an estranged son with. 

A snap of His fingers, and the pale, tear-streaked face of a youth appeared in his guest’s chalice of wine.

“Poor boy,” the guest ; a lanky Demon, raised a dark eyebrow in mild interest as he peered at the conjured reflection, “this one? Really!”

The Great I Am nodded, narrowing His eyes at the sight of the yawning demon before Him, Mephistopheles fully stretched out on the chair as if it were a bed. Behind him the angel Mikhail, His personal attendee, rolled their eyes.

Maybe this trial could humble His lost son.

“A refill, my Lord?” they mumbled, but the Lord waved them aside. 

“Make him like you ;a spirit who denies. Then I will grant any single thing you please.” Jehovah spoke again in that sacred, ominous tone, his eyes glinting at something ancient and all-knowing. Something that, if Mephistopheles had not seen many times before, would have made the demon shudder. 

Demon and deity locked eyes, and when the Lord looked again, the child of Hell was no longer standing before him. 

* * *

Heinrich, or as he deigned to call himself, Hal Faust was definitely not his father.

Johann Georg was decisive and noble, if noble meant deliberately infecting a poor family with the plague so he could study the symptoms.  For the greater good,  Hal’s father would say. 

Johann Georg was clever, for he left university early to make his way in the world but earned a golden, glowing reputation to his name as a professor. He was so confident with his knowledge.

Johann Georg also insisted he has a daughter named Agatha, a lovely young maid with fire spun in her auburn hair, the only remaining bit of his beautiful wife across the seas in India where she had come on the Silk Road, he would describe to his students in hope of making a match. The professor denied the fact that his late wife ever bore him a son.

(Of course, Hal was the far opposite of all three. Soft and trembling and desperately wishing as he watched his father turn away from a woman dying in childbirth, reading his father’s books voraciously yet never getting the chance to be anything, binding his chest and hips and cutting and dyeing his hair from red to brown) 

Still, Hal found himself at his grave, if only for the fact that the house ; once filled with the noises of his experiments and dabbling into alchemy, was now silent. No one sat across the young brown-haired boy at dinner. The servants looked at him with pitiful glances, whispering in low voices of “poor Herr Faust, so young to lose his father”. 

“What do I do, papa?” Hal Faust’s voice was a bit shaky as he spoke, almost willing the cross bearing his father’s name and the mound of dirt and the dried flowers to respond. “You never cared for a son, but..” 

Speech failed him, then. Reasons filled his head on why Johann was definitely not a feasible, pleasant man, but Hal could not hate his father. 

While Johann couldn’t have been bent to understand that a person could be born with breasts and a vagina yet still be not a woman, it was his father who had showed him how to draw blood and cure a fever. Who had allowed him, eleven years old and excited yet astonished, to watch as he performed surgery. Who had told him he was clever, that he could learn anything in this world if he wanted to.

“Well, that hardly matters now, does it!” the words came out more angrily than he had originally meant them, but it was not as if his father could hear. No matter how much he wished to learn, how clever his father claimed him to be, no one would care enough to teach him. Not while his only legacy was Agatha Faust,  the _daughter_ of Johann Georg Faust.

“God, I’d sell my soul to not be just that.” 

** (Hal was none the wiser to the sacredness of his words ; or that, far, far above, Someone listened to his prayer.)  **

A low-growing, wilted rose bush planted at a nearby grave rustled, and Faust turned sharply, breath hitching, to see the snout of a water spaniel poking out. The rest of the dog soon came tumbling, as if out of nowhere, its tail wagging and its tongue lolling out in the way of all dogs ever since the first wolf accepted scraps of meat before a warm fire. The dog barked and reared, pushing its nose against his cheek, evidently as alone and lost as he is. A childhood friend of his, Gretchen, now a baker in the city square and married, had a dog once, a little ruddy thing with yapping barks and the tendency to roll around in the snow. 

Hal could’ve sworn that the little paw marks left hissing embers on the earth,  but that’s just insane, isn’t it?

“Well,” the young doctor shook his head, and when Faust looked into the dog’s eyes, the doe orbs gleamed of something like odd encouragement, “hello there, little friend.” 


	2. Hal I - The Meeting

The very second Faust raised a hand to pet the wagging creature, a sudden weight sent him sprawling almost onto the fresh dirt covering his father‘s grave.About to give the beast a piece of his mind for pouncing, Faust dusted his long dress and glared up.

How he wished he hadn’t looked.

An unearthly screaming cut through the night air, silencing the nocturnal insects and birds of the graveyard. The very ground itself seemed to crack into pieces as if snapped by claws. In the shadows the grinning dog’s limbs stretched and turned gruesomely, the snapping of each bone pronounced so clearly that Faust couldn’t decide between damn pissing himself right there or running, cringing all the while with each sickening crunch.

The dog - no, the beast’s - teeth snapped ferociously, tasting the air, breaths coming out in puffs in the autumn chill. Its black, coarse-coated body was poised like a prowling animal, about to gulp down its prey. _Shit. Shitshitshitshit_.

Utterly terrified as he was, beads of sweat streaming down his face and back and near the point of tears, Faust was unable to tear his eyes away from the thing’s gnashing jaws. The longer he looked, the more teeth it had, gleaming in the moonlight.

The young brown-haired doctor hunched into himself, low curses under his breath, scrambling back only to realize that his back was to someone’s grave marker. Hal didn’t know what was louder, the thudding of his heart or the beast’s otherworldly snarl.

Whatever this thing is, all he knew is that this was the kind of thing to have come straight from Hell.

Then there was a very human sounding laugh, clear as the chiming of a bell, and in the hulking dog creature’s place was a tall man shrouded a crimson cloak, a feathered cap proudly adorned on his dark head, the elegantly handsome look of him completed with a gleaming sword at his belt.The man’s entire face shone with mirth, a mound of giggles escaping his lips.

The long-legged bastard, now stepped back to stand a considerable distance away, was laughing at him!

“What,” Faust managed that, terror giving way to anger and curiosity at once seeing that the odd man wasn’t about to harm him, “And.. and how did you..?” _shape-shift, transform, whatever it was you did_ the brown haired boy gestured wildly, trying to look for a word.

“Mephistopheles, at your service.” the dark man bowed, his cape swishing as he did, “just a regular demon trait, you know?”

Hal uneasily nodded as he stood up proper, realizing that he was nowhere tall as this.. creature. Apparently demons are real, who would’ve thought..


	3. Hal II - The Offer

“...why exactly are you here again?” Faust pressed, trying his best to square up to the taller demon, eyebrows furrowing. ”Surely Hell will not punish a person whose only sin is to despise his God-given body.”

Mephistopheles’s smile was precarious as he shook his head. “No, doctor, it’s just a body. Those who are dysphoric still enjoy salvation in my Father’s kingdom... given you are not prone to murder. Heaven is boring any way, only choirs and waltzing.”

Pointedly ignoring his question of “but what does it mean to be dysphoric?” the demon, who Hal only noticed now had patches of white among his dark skin - vitiligo, his father had called this condition - snapped his fingers, a parchment and quill appearing in his hand. Mephistopheles’s long nails was sharp as claws.

“Anyway, I’m not here to punish you, Hal, just to give you a nice little bargain.” The demon crooned, using his nickname as if he were familiar with the brown-haired nineteen year old already. “Heinrich,” he corrected Mephistopheles, “that’s my full name, my real name... and what exactly are you going to give me?”

”You are not just Agatha Faust, you have never been. You were always meant to be Heinrich, to show your ability and intelligence to the world, and make it safer. I can help you with that... first of all I’d get rid of this ugly dress for you.” Mephistopheles weaved around Hal in the graceful way of all long-legged men, before snapping his fingers again. The young doctor’s mourning black dress was replaced with a set of robes and a blue scarf, and the fabric felt soft and warm to the touch. His warm hand on Hal’s shoulder felt welcome, in a way, and his smile might just could be perceived as genuine. “You just need to fork over your soul to Hell when our little pact is done.”.

He didn’t care, he decided, even if the demon was lying about people not faithful to their birth sex going to Heaven. An opportunity’s an opportunity, and if this Mephistopheles held enough witchcraft in his clawed hand to transform between man and dog, then certainly he could use magic to give him certain things he wanted. Hal thinks of a whole new wardrobe, a chance to travel across the seas to places unmapped, a pouch of gold coins to freely give to the poor, and smiles.

“Alright.” Hal nodded, because if he was already going to Hell for liking both men and women and gallivanting about as neither a man nor a woman, he might as well do it with finesse and as a demon’s friend, having committed a thousand misdemeanors, rather then get dragged screaming down for committing one. “So what can you do for me, demon?” 

“Everything, you need only ask. I’ll be in your service for twenty four years and when you die, your soul will belong to Lucifer Himself.” Hal nodded once again, stealing himself, and didn’t flinch as Mephistopheles’s claw pierced his vein and his blood ran scarlet onto the old parchment.

**So I see the deal is made.**

_Yes, Father. Let us see who wins our little bet_


End file.
